Akiva and Ahuva Lewin were with their father at the Lakewood Cemetery to honor their grandfather, as it had been ten years since he had passed away.

Their father had held off on taking them until this day because he had felt that they were too young to understand what it meant that their grandfather had been gone for so long.

The groundskeeper came out with the three of them and opened up a micro notebook, attaching a small projector that allowed them to all comfortably use the notebook at the same time.

Akiva asked their father what kind of man their grandfather was, and he was only too happy to answer.

“As you can see,” he said, “He was a very wise man — you can see this through this tool that shows you the most typical words that he used on Twitter, and the subject matters about which he tweeted, and they were quite brilliant.”

Akiva opened up another tool on the computer and typed in the words “cheese sandwich” and soon over three thousand photographs of cheese sandwiches that his grandfather had photographed and uploaded to Instagram were charted and listed in order of their being taken by him.

The groundskeeper showed them how they could search his past Facebook posts and see what he liked by year, category, and in some cases by game.

Akiva’s father particularly appreciated the special tool that the cemetery had commissioned that scraped every social media site used by the deceased and scripted a beautiful eulogy that was tailored for the person reading it — he read over the eulogy that he gave for his father.

Ahuva was impressed by how her father somehow knew that not only Hillary Clinton would run for and win the presidential election, but that her daughter Chelsea would also eventually run and win years later.

As they left the cemetery, they all appreciated having a copy of the entire experience to take with them on their phones.

18 Comments

  1. Now that’s an accomplishment, Gordon! A perfect Ten Sentence Story that is exactly 330 words! Wowser! SMILE! I like it you are keeping the 10txt tradition alive!

    Fascinating topic. As those who die, and leave their social networking footprints behind, the rest of us are left to divine meaning in what they found important to memorialize.

    1. Thank you, David! Totally unintentionally done. I actually always try to aim for at least three hundred words when writing 10txts.

      I also like keeping the 10txt tradition alive — and moreover, I love writing flash fiction like this.

      I particularly like the idea of people sorting and arranging every single food item that people choose to put on Instagram.

      1. I don’t understand the foodies who memorialize every food they eat at every meal and then post it online. There sure are a lot of them, though!

        I love the whole 10txt idea and tradition — but for some reason those pieces never took off as a site of their own. I did some of my best, most compressed writing there and nobody really saw it. Not much traffic at all.

        1. Too true. Here’s my sushi from today. Here’s my sushi from yesterday! Wow, sir, it looks great!

          I wonder if part of the problem with posting fiction online and hoping for traffic is that there is just SO much of it that it’s easy to get lost in the slush sea.

          1. Yes, there is a lot of it — that’s why I think it’s good that 10txt is embedded here now, so we can link to those articles and, we hope, give them more exposure in the search window.

          2. I wonder if there is a way to easily catalog and index the archive by words commonly found in articles. That would be pretty keen.

  2. This is amazing. I never would have thought that the future of Facebook and Twitter could lead to helping someone’s eulogy. I really hope that this isn’t the reality of our future, but an interesting article nonetheless.

    1. If you think about it, eulogies are meant to discuss the person’s life — and what better way to discuss their life than to scrape their choice words and mash them together into a nice package? Of course, this would make for some very dull and not at all emotional eulogies… unless the person tweeted some potent words during their life! 🙂

        1. Brielle! I love that you wrote “True story!” I say that all the time. Maybe you should! 🙂

  4. I like the leap into the future. It is an effective way to give the reader space for, I hope, some introspection.

  5. My poor grandchildren will learn nothing fron twitter – facebook would be another story – I do quite like the twist on the whole Eulogy idea though – having written far to many of them it would be nice to have it all there ready for you ,

    1. I’m glad you like it! I imagine some rewriting would be necessary to make it less robotic, so to speak!

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